[Not NovaWrimo 2017] The Martian Question

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Author's Note: This short story is by no means complete, and probably is riddled with plot holes and errors that I originally intended to fix. But alas, the submission date has passed and I have chosen to release this story to the world. I thought NQ’s lore was geocentric and I wanted to explore the possibility of what happens offworld, to extraterrestrial peoples. In my version of the lore, the colonists manage to win their freedom and the right to robotics/AI from the UEF, creating a civilization around the outer planets and possibly creating a “fusion torch”(See Isaac Arthur’s “Colonizing Jupiter” for more information) to actually push Jupiter/Saturn to another planet. This is actually possible within a reasonable amount of time with automation! However, Earth degenerates into a backwaters ****hole at the same time. In the lore,a “technological renaissance” is described at the early 23rd century which allowed humanity to finally build the ark ships. However, due to the reactionary UEF and the independent organizations that was actually administering over the arkships(much like the public-private partnerships of today) thanks to the lack of large-scale political structure other then the aforementioned reactionaries, a particularly radical libertarian and conservative group was controlling the Novark and what to put in the Novark database. This act of revisionist history allowed for such a geocentric history in the archives and the lack of advanced Arkship technologies. But I digress. Coming back to the people living offworld, they gave the UEF the technologies needed for the arkships and the Novark group covered it up, wanting to preserve their ideologies. Their libertarian ideology also explains such an illogical way of colonizing another solar system, instead of mining asteroids to obtain the resources needed to establish a functioning civilization(see Isaac Arthur’s Early Interstellar Colonies for details, and yes, I do like his Youtube channel). Overall, the reason my “headcanon” so to speak is so different from the official canon is because of Novark’s revisionist history.

One final (unrelated) note: The Novark Safe Zone force field could have acted as a whipple shield, assuming the Novark was in a traditional rocket configuration(There is no way the Novark alone made the journey: there has to be external fuel tanks to get enough delta-V to accelerate to 0.995c and decelerate. But it is a different story if it was in a configuration like the ISV Venture Star or the Valkyrie, which makes sense since it takes more mass for the same material to withstand compressive stress(being pushed) then tensile stress(being pulled).

-0something0

"Standing inside the transparent dome and looking out at the red dust of the great deserts of Mars. I took in the sky and the pale blue dot we call “Earth”. I was nervous: I had a speech to give to the Trans-Ares Assembly, the organization created to handle things between colonies and to give a stronger voice for the colonies. Abruptly, my phone rang, notifying me of a text message stating: “Mr. Cerman, the assembly begins in 10 minutes”. I hastily walked out the dome..."